All right, so we have a few weeks yet before May Day. But the trees outside my window are blooming (and smell like fish, incidentally) and it's so lazily warm that my ice cream cone this afternoon was a race between me and the heat, eating vs. melting all over my fingers, so I shall declare a round of "Wild Mountain Thyme" for the house and call it real spring. Will ye go, lassie, go?
Today's mail brought my contributor's copies of The Magazine of Speculative Poetry 7.1, the special double-size Winter/Spring anniversary issue—25th issue and 20th year of publication. It's pretty huge. And very good. Therein may be found my poems "Etemmu" and "Genesis." The first of these derives from a piece of wordplay in Atrahasis, the Babylonian Flood story; I blame it entirely on Eckart Frahm, Assyriologist extraordinaire, who two years ago taught the class in which I first read that particular epic. (In fact, it's probably his fault that I can now read Akkadian at all.) "Genesis" is not Biblical: it comes out of the kind of folktale where the childless couple gets a child from snow, or bamboo, or clay, and it's somewhat related to my song "Effigy." And if neither of those concepts intrigues you, there's Mark Rudolph, Yoon Ha Lee, Ann K. Schwader, David Kopaska-Merkel, Kendall Evans, Bruce Boston, Robert Frazier, and all sorts of other fine poetry to keep you entertained instead.
I think this is, hands down, my favorite article to appear about the late Pope. "Trained pontifical lepidopterist" is not a phrase that gets enough mileage.
Today's mail brought my contributor's copies of The Magazine of Speculative Poetry 7.1, the special double-size Winter/Spring anniversary issue—25th issue and 20th year of publication. It's pretty huge. And very good. Therein may be found my poems "Etemmu" and "Genesis." The first of these derives from a piece of wordplay in Atrahasis, the Babylonian Flood story; I blame it entirely on Eckart Frahm, Assyriologist extraordinaire, who two years ago taught the class in which I first read that particular epic. (In fact, it's probably his fault that I can now read Akkadian at all.) "Genesis" is not Biblical: it comes out of the kind of folktale where the childless couple gets a child from snow, or bamboo, or clay, and it's somewhat related to my song "Effigy." And if neither of those concepts intrigues you, there's Mark Rudolph, Yoon Ha Lee, Ann K. Schwader, David Kopaska-Merkel, Kendall Evans, Bruce Boston, Robert Frazier, and all sorts of other fine poetry to keep you entertained instead.
I think this is, hands down, my favorite article to appear about the late Pope. "Trained pontifical lepidopterist" is not a phrase that gets enough mileage.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}